The "developer group" is looking at my file, and the senior support technician, who found the problem with the corrupt master pages, will be reporting back to me tomorrow.

However, he said the reason my files were bad (he did not use the word "corrupt" this time, in fact, he danced around it) was that I used "multiple master pages."

"So, you're telling me that the cause of the corruption is that I used multiple master pages?"

"Yes, that is correct."

"But isn't InDesign intended to use multiple master pages, and aren't they set up so that they can be linked together?"

"Yes, but you used multiple master pages [12 total], that is why you have problem. You have them linked to Master A, you must have them linked to None, then it will work."

Ah, I've sent a copy of this to George Orwell, I think he'll know the answer. Meanwhile, I'll post the developer group's answer, which he absolutely promised to have tomorrow, "These are the engineers who created InDesign."

"But isn't InDesign intended to use multiple master pages, and aren't they set up so that they can be linked together?"

"Yes, but you used multiple master pages [12 total], that is why you have problem. You have them linked to Master A, you must have them linked to None, then it will work."

I think you have to read this a bit more carefully, realizing that it's probably not written by a native English speaker, and realize that it's not Orwellian.

You are dealing with a bug.

Of course InDesign isn't supposed to have bugs, but everything has bugs.

There is some reason why the bug is being triggered in this case. This guy is trying to tell you that the problem is related to chained master pages (I think. Though that detail isn't critical to my point), which is not something that everyone does, and if your master pages were arranged differnetly, you wouldn't have the problem.

This is undoubtedly true. He's advising you of the area in which the bug lies. This is useful information, because it gives you a clue as to how to avoid the problem.

It's not meant to be a "solution," but it's informatino about the problem so you can workaround it. And indeed, so Engineering can fix it.

I am curious, do you have 12 independent masters, or do you have masters that are based on other masters, or deeper hierarchy levels?

Oh right, I have your sample file. Yeah, you have A on which you base B on which you base C on which you base D ... all the way to M (13).

That's definitely not a common configuration, and one I suspect you could avoid by flattening your master hierarchy a bit. It's a lot more common to have, say, 8 master based on 4 different masters.

We spoke very carefully. I believe what he was trying to do was deflect the basic problem from InDesign to me. But the problem has been escalated up beyond him, so that is good.

But he was correct: there were two badly corrupted master pages and two that were only a little bad. Thus removing them and rebuilding them was the correct work around: however, it does not prevent it from happening again, and since it did happen in three unrelated files (the only three files I've created in InDesign with headers in the last month) I have no reason to assume it won't keep happening. He also said my file was big. The first file to corrupt this was had 12,000 words in it and 8 chapters, and it was created from a Word file.

In formatting a book with 16 chapters, where each chapter has it's own headers (e.g. title/author, or title/chapter name), this is easily accomodated with linked master pages. If the author changes the tile of his book from "Around the World in 97 Days" to "Around the World in 80 Days" it's a piece of cake to change that, once, and it flows through the entire book. The text in the running heads is the only difference between the master pages.

Creating separate master pages, where everything has to be created from scratch, could take me several hours (sixteen masters total), and wouldn't be as goods as linking them.

This may not be common, but certainly if Word can handle a 80+ different headers, gosh, I would assume better of InDesign.

In formatting a book with 16 chapters, where each chapter has it's own headers (e.g. title/author, or title/chapter name), this is easily accomodated with linked master pages. If the author changes the tile of his book from "Around the World in 97 Days" to "Around the World in 80 Days" it's a piece of cake to change that, once, and it flows through the entire book. The text in the running heads is the only difference between the master pages.

I'm afraid I don't understand.

It's quite common to have, say, 11 master pages all based off a single master page. That is, Page A has common elements, and then pages B through M are based off of page A. It would seem like that would fit your requirements handily. Two levels of hierarchy.

It's also reasonably common to have a bit more hierarchy. B, C, and D are based off of A, and are 3 different variants. Then E though M are based off of B, C, and D, depending. And then perhaps there is a special variant of M that changes on item. So three levels of hierarchy, plus the odd 4th.

But what is uncommon is to have a twelve levels of hierarchy. Certainly it should work, but it's out of the ordinary, and bugs often arise in out of the ordinary situations.

InDesign can easily handle many many master pages. But what's special in your case is the hierarchy depth. So comparing it to 80+ headers in Word is not the right comparison.

Creating separate master pages, where everything has to be created from scratch, could take me several hours (sixteen masters total), and wouldn't be as goods as linking them.

Link them all to a single master and spend a few minutes cutting and pasting pages. I don't see why it would take several hours at all.

In formatting a book with 16 chapters, where each chapter has it's own headers (e.g. title/author, or title/chapter name), this is easily accomodated with linked master pages. If the author changes the tile of his book from "Around the World in 97 Days" to "Around the World in 80 Days" it's a piece of cake to change that, once, and it flows through the entire book. The text in the running heads is the only difference between the master pages.

It may also be possible that the entire book can be done with a single master, if all that is changing on your current masters is the headers/footers. This is waht variables exel at doing, and a running header variable or two on a single master may be able to do the work of all twelve that you are using now.

Please, anyone reading this, let me know if you've had this problem. CS says you have if you use more than 3-4 linked master pages.

The answer from the InDesign Development Team is:

No InDesign file can have more than 3-4 linked Master Pages without them becoming corrupted

This is true for al versions of InDesign

This is normal for InDesign

The only way to avoid the problem is to create smaller documents, chapter by chapter, and use the Book feature to combine them in to one finshed file for printing

This means that global changes cannot be made, other than chapter-by-chapter. The result for most books I format, would be an additional 10+ hours--unless, of course, I chose to ignore problems and only format.

My questions were, and has not been answered: If this is normal behavior for InDesign: 1) Why didn't people on the InDesign forum get it quickly? 2) If this is normal behavior, how could I for years create books with 30-100+ linked master pages without these problems? 3) Why aren't these limitations on Master Pages discussed somewhere--certainly not that I have found.

A master is like a background that you can quickly apply to many pages. . . . You can create a master variation that is based on and updates with another master (called the parent master) within the same document. The master spreads based on the parent master are called child masters. For example, if your document has ten chapters that use master spreads that vary only slightly, base all of them on a master spread that contains the layout and objects common to all ten. This way, a change to the basic design requires editing just the parent master instead of editing all ten separately. Vary the formatting on your child masters. You can override parent master items on a child master to create variations on a master, just as you can override master items on document pages. This is a powerful way to keep a consistent yet varied design up to date. [Using Adobe InDesign CS5 & CS5.5, pg 70 & 72, November 16, 2011 update, from indesign_cs5_help.pdf]

• No InDesign file can have more than 3-4 linked Master Pages without them becoming corrupted

I think we need to be a bit more clear what "linked Master Pages" means, because for the naive interpretation that's certainly not true.

I think they are perhaps saying, "If you chain more than 3 master pages, you are likely to experience corruption." And by chain, I mean master page D depends on master page C depends on master page B depends on master page A.

That level of hiearchy is not normal for most InDesign users, so I am not surprised that there are bugs there that have not been found.

It's emphatically normal for documents to have many (e.g. scores) of master pages that are all linked to a common master. That is, B1 through B20 all depend on A.

In any event, any corruption problem is unambiguously a bug. Make sure to get a bug number. If there is resistance, that is bad, and you should push harder and escalate.

• This is true for al versions of InDesign

• This is normal for InDesign

Well, if the claim is that this is not a new bug and it has always existed, I do not find that claim surprising. (For the aforementioned reasons.)

• The only way to avoid the problem is to create smaller documents, chapter by chapter, and use the Book feature to combine them in to one finshed file for printing

This I don't get at all. Why can't you just use Master Pages in the normal way? (I've been trying to ask that for several posts, but perhaps

OK, I don't have any files I can find with more than two or three masters based on the same parent, nor any with a chain of masters such as you initially described where a is based on b is based on c is based on d is based on e... so that page z would have 25 generations of parenting to go back through. Note that this is NOT the scenario described in the help quote above. That desribes b based on a, c based on a, d based on a, and so forth, and that's a quite common setup.

It wouldn't surprise me to see a long document with more layers of dependency, but I've never needed to go more than three, nor do I recall a case where I needed more than about a half-dozen masters in any single document, certainly not since the introduction of variables, but I tend to build really long docs as Books, not single files, just to make it easier to navigate and to spread the risk of total destruction. That said, I find the not-more-than-three-or-four-masters explanation completely without credibility. For one thing, I can't imagine you are the only one to ever try it, and if you are not, I can't imagine that in ten years nobody else has posted this "design limitation."

There is no question that you should be able to do what you are describing. If you are getting document corruption due to using this type of document organization, you are indeed encountering a bug. And even if is either a built-in or defacto limit to such chaining of master pages in InDesign, the program should prevent you from having any more than such a limit and certainly not let your document.

I've looked through our internal bug database and could not find any open bug that seems to correspond with anything like this. Do you have any information from whoever spoke to you in Tech Support, either a bug number or a case number for your incident?

I haven't seen anything by way of an example of what you are doing, but here are a few thoughts.

First, Is there anything on master C the is on master B, but NOT on master A? If what you are doing is changing the header each time, and you are always changing the same object, ALL of the masters can be based on A.

Second, a running head variable picks up text that occurs on the page, or if it is not on the current page, on the first page where it does appear, working backward. Running head variables come in two flavors, character style or paragraph style, but for most situations the paragraph style flavor works fine.

Here's how they work: Add text to the page using the style you want to pick up. In this case, probably a chapter title and an author name. This means you need to define two variables, one for each style, and that the chapter name and the author shold each be separatye paragraphs, and should each be assigned a unique style that is not used elsewhere. Place the variable on the master page where you want the text to appear. Make sure there is enough room inthe frame to hold the longest string that will get picked up all on one line (if you need to break lines, you'll have to define more variables and use character styles instead -- each variable picks up the entire string to which the style is applied) because for formatting purposes a variable is a single character and will not break. You can assigne any formatting you like to the variable, just like any other text, so it needn't match the formatting where the the text originally appears. Again, becasue the variable itself is a single character, if you need part of the text to appear differently from the rest in the header, you'll need to break it into multiple character style-based variables and assign character styles to the original text (these styles can be nothing more than names and not do any actual formatting in the original text).

Variables can also pick up hidden or non-printing text in case you need to use something that doesn't appear in the final output. There are a number of ways to do this -- add an anchored object with the text and set it to non-printing, or add an entire non-printing layer, for example. When I add this kind of "label" I generally make it big and red so it stands out and I don't forget it.

Primarily, what changes between master pages is the running header: which often does not contain text from the pages (e.g. book title, author name).

Often I create new master with new guidelines to be used in that chapter only . . . and so if I've adjusted the guidelines and do not want them to appear in the next chapter's master, I would base the next guideline on an earlier master page.

I am a visual artist. When I design something I want to see "My Great American Novel" and not <book title> (or whatever the variable would look like. I have had Master Pages where I have adjusted the text in the header based on its visual weight.

Often I create new master with new guidelines to be used in that chapter only . . . and so if I've adjusted the guidelines and do not want them to appear in the next chapter's master, I would base the next guideline on an earlier master page.

That's definitely not the normal use of master pages.

A functional equivalent for you, I think, would be to duplicate the Chapter 3 master and make the new master the Chapter 4 master.

Both Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 would be based on some common master, but 4 would not be based on 3, and you would not run into chaining.

But normally, you'd have, say, a Normal Chapter master, and then base all the Chapter masters on the Normal Chapter.

And maybe you'd have Normal Chapter with Guides and Normal Chapter without Guides and base the chapter masters on those two

masters. etc.

Incidently, I bet that you wouldn't have problems if your chained masters did not override objects on the parent masters, but I doubt that helps you very much.

When I asked the CreateSpace forum, those who responded all had different ways of using Master Pages.

Perhaps basing everything on A (B based on A, C based on A, D based on A, Ebased on A . . .) makes the most sense.

But the InDesign Development Team did not say E based on A is better than E based on D based on C . . . A.

What the Development Team said was, "Use no more than 3-4 Master Pages." That is clear, concise, and unqulified.

However, there is nothing in the Help manual, in any of the countless searches I've done for looking for help, that has this limit. But "All versions of InDesign have this problem, including CS 6. We are aware of it, and we are working on it."

I thank each of you for your time, but clearly there is something wrong that no one here has experienced. And no one here can actually fix.

you wouldn't have problems if

I wouldn't have this problem if I packed bags of grocieries for a living.

I'm not going to attempt to tell you what to do here. I think what you've done SHOULD be working, but I'll toss out that on general principles I believe that the fewer generations you go through with chaining styles, master pages, or even basing one document on another by doing a save as with a new name over and over for things like magazine issues, the better off you will be be. A spoke-and-hub organizition for any of these parent-child relationships has fewer steps in general and fewer opportunities for problems to creep in.

Ok, fair enough. Throughout this month-long fiesta, one of the problems that has occurred, not with any predictability but in conjunction with the corruption, has been that when the InDesign files become thoroughly corrupted, InDesign would sometimes freeze, and, usually everything else would freeze. About half time, some things would unfreeze, and I could shut down InDesign, and a few time I had to power down the system. (I am not wanting for resources in the general sense, not with 8GB of ram.)

Today, new file, new book, 2 weeks past the "deadline" because of these problems, and NO master pages. InDesign froze 4 times. Four times I have had to power down. Ok, no big deal. But . . .

I had flowed (File > Place > _____________. doc then with the shift key down, I clicked the text and it populated the book) a 210 page book with 56 tables from Word into a new InDesign file. (I'm taking everyone's advice: no master pages, at least not right now.) After 8 hours of work on the tables only, I got to page 136, the last out port showed there was more text: it was a little red box with +. . . great . . . I shift clicked on the next page, and 3 blank pages, but there's more text as indicated by the last out port, red with a little plus . . . again and again, blank pages . . . again and again blank pages.

OK . . . I know, like my egregious misuse of Master Pages, my false perception of corruption, my misunderstanding of InDesign non-technicians who do not speak English, that this must be my fault too.

Yes, post hoc ergo propter hoc . . . But you tell me, please. How do I trust InDesign? We are now 4 for 4.

I have tried it two more times, it still does not flow text beyond page 136, but each files shows there is more text, and the additional text is blank pages. And some 78 pages are missing.

Yes, it could be a corruption in the Word file . . . but I spent one week assuming the other three files were bad because it was a dead mouse, out-of-date drivers, malware, a a bad InDesign installation, other system problems, corrupt Word file (the first of the 4 InDesign files this month started as Word) . . .

Ok, fair enough. Throughtout this month-long fiesta, one of the problems that has occurred, not with any predictability but in conjuncition with the corruption, has been that when the InDesign files become thoroughly corrupted, InDesign would sometimes freeze, and, usually everything else would freeze. About half time, some things would unfreeze, and I could shut down InDesign, and a few time I had to power down the system. (I am not wanting for resources in the general sense, not with 8GB of ram.)

Power down? Something is seriously wrong.

It should not be possible for InDesign to hang the operating system such that the OS does not respond.

(I do 98% of my InDesign work on Macs, so I cannot give you perfectly solid Windows advice, but nonetheless my comments should apply to both platforms.)

I assume you're saying that you cannot hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and get to the task manager and stop InDesign.

Note that ID is a 32-bit app and cannot address more than 4GB of RAM under any circumstances, and perhaps substantially less under Windows (3GB?).

I would suggest breaking out the OS diagnostic tools, but here's where my Windows knowledge takes a turn for the worse.

I could speculate that perhaps InDesign is in a tight loop (when it hangs, it's either waiting for some other app/process/thread, and thus doing nothing, or it is in a tight loop doing something on its own) and the OS is having difficulty getting the cycles to handle the task manager. I don't think that should be something that should easily happen, but I guess it could. I hesitate to say "bugs in the operating system," but I do think that would have to be the case. What processor and how many cores? What other apps are running at the same time as InDesign and what kind of CPU usage? Do you have stuff like background virus scanning going on at the same time?

OK . . . I know, like my egregious misuse of Master Pages, my false perception of corruption, my misunderstandomg of InDesing non-technicians who do not speak English, that this must be my fault too.

I think you've misunderstood.

It's not about fault.

It's about what you can do to avoid the problems.

It doesn't mean the problems are not there.

But from the perspective of problem avoidance, fault is irrelevant.

The only person who can avoid the problems today is you -- Adobe can't make you a magic release of InDesign on Tuesday (or at least, the chances of them doing so are vanishingly small), so it does all fall back to you.

I think you may have misunderstood me back in post #2 when I said, "You describe four problems in subsequent bullets -- are those symptoms of the corruption in the first bullet, or is there some other indication you have of corruption?" It was not, and was not intended to be, a claim that your symptoms were not consistent with corruption in the document (or a "false perception"). They were consistent with corruption. But you structured them as five bullet points with the first bullet being corruption, and it was not at all clear whether you had evidence of the corruption aside from your subsequent bullet points. Personally I find it deeply ironic that we have additional confusion about hierarchy: that in your master pages, you used too much hierarchy (in my not-so-humble estimation), and in your bug reporting/discussion, you used too little (again, by my estimation).

I don't think there's any false perception of corruption. There was (and is) a desire on my part for clarity -- to know exactly why you thought you had corruption, and what the symptoms were. And your post was sufficiently vague (again, because I couldn't tell if bullets 2-5 were intended to be examples of corruption, or if they were seperate non-corruption issues) that I sought clarification.

Anyhow:

I had flowed (File > Place > _____________. doc then with the shift key down, I clicked the text and it populated the book) a 210 page book with 56 tables from Word into a new InDesign file. (I'm taking everyone's advice: no master pages, at least not right now.) After 8 hours of work on the tables only, I got to page 136, the last out port showed there was more text: it was a little red box with +. . . great . . . I shift clicked on the next page, and 3 blank pages, but there's more text as indicated by the last out port, red with a little plus . . . again and again, blank pages . . . again and again blank pages.

Under normal circumstances, this just indicates that the formatting of the text won't fit in the text frame you have alloted to it. This can be because the type is too large, because there are keep options that don't fit, because of spacing before/after, literally a myriad of things.

In your case, based on the narrative, it's probably because there is a table that is too large to fit in the textframe.

The obvious choices are to use the Story Editor (Ctrl-Y) to check the contents of the story that is overset, and perhaps to make the containing text frame substantially bigger (maybe 10x bigger in both x and y dimensions). In the Story Editor, you could try temporarily deleting (or cutting) the table (or other text) that is directly after the overset indicator, as a test to determine the source of the problem.

But you tell me, please. How do I trust InDesign? We are now 4 for 4.

Obviously you cannot trust it!

It is has given you bad behavior and there is no end in sight.

To the extent that you can try to determine what you do that causes it problems and avoid those things, great. But that's not always going to be possible.

In this particular case it doesn't sound like a bug (unlike your other behavior).

Please forgive me for being angry. I've lost 3 weeks work, 3 weeks of pay. 3 for 3 now 4 for 4. I am willing to admit each could be a coincidence, appologies to Mr. Holmes.

Yes, powering down is serious. No, Ctr Alt Del does not do anything when everything freezes. I have waited as long as 30 minutes. Sometimes things unfreeze in 1-5 minutes. But at 30, they've gone arctic. This happened at least a six or more times while I was working with Adobe Technical Support. They were unimpressed by it, and it happend to them, too!

For over twelve years now, I spend all my time on either InDesign or Photoshop.

Resources above 2.5 GB, the maximum for InDesign 5.5 and lower, are important because they make the difference between InDesign getting its full 2.5 GB if it needs it or not when other things are happening or running. . . . of course this can be effected by ineffiecient memory allocations: GIMP, for example, is not as good as Photoshop when it comes to good memory allocations.

Processor: Intel Core i5 CPU, M460, @253GHz

This happens with no other applications running, and with other applications running. Yes, I have antivirus/malware software running. With 8GB of RAM, that shouldn't be a problem . . . and it hasn't been, even using Photoshop and InDesign simultaneiously in Windows XP with 2 GB of RAM.

The question of fault is due to my frustration. So, listening to everyone, I created the first file since the bad three with no Master Pages--at least not yet. And that first file is incomplete--a good 2 weeks past the deadline--it is faulty. Yes, I am the only one on my machine who can prevent a problem, but I was "preventing" a problem by not intending to use Master pages.

I know that the red out port means there is more that has not been included in the text frame. But it is not a table that is too large to fit the fram: when I extend the text frame to 25 inches wide, the red out port turns blue, and there is nothing more in the text frame. It's empty, and it did not flow 78 pages in.

I'd have gotten sooner, but in playing with the text frames, InDesing froze. (Firefox and Windows were running.) It took a 4-5 minutes and it unfroze.

The problem with avoiding problems is that the only way I can avoid them, if creating a file is problematic is to not use InDesign.

I don't know what to tell you about powering down other than useless non-platitudes ("This doesn't happen on Mac OS. It shouldn't be possible for an application to hang the operating system without serious bugs inthe OS.") Maybe you should try installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview on a spare hard drive or partition...I'm not surprised that Adobe is not surprised about this sort of thing, though. It probably does happen to many people, and in a very hard-to-track down way. And like a generic error (such as APPCRASH), it can occur for thousands of reasons...

The i5 CPU M460 is a dual-core CPU. Initially I was going to suggest that a dual-core CPU was less likely to have these problems, but in retrospect I'm not sure that's true. I can imagine subtle hyperthreading issues tripping up the OS, etc.

Assuming your other apps aren't actively working, they should be swapped out anyhow. I doubt memory has much to do with the situation. Antivirus software has been known to cause weird problems like this. I don't know, I suppose it is a shot in the dark, but I would try disabling it and see if it improves the situation. This is not to say you should not use anti-virus software, but sometimes some software, with some settings, has bad interactions.

Hopefully someone else will have better suggestions.

I know that the red out port means there is more that has not been included in the text frame. But it is not a table that is too large to fit the fram: when I extend the text frame to 25 inches wide, the red out port turns blue, and there is nothing more in the text frame. It's empty, and it did not flow 78 pages in.

Again, I would strongly encourage you to try the story editor as a diagnostic tool in these situations.

You can also try exporting your Word document to RTF (or using whichever of .doc or .docx you are not using) and see if you get different results.

You absolutely need to look at taht story in Story Editor. Wahtever is a problem is probably in the very first line of the overset text.

The page 136 sort of rings a bell, too, but I wouldn't swear to it. Several versions back there was a bug that stopped text flow, or skipped a page or something -- my memory is pretty foggy about what it was -- but I think it also may have involved text on a path and I thought it had been corrected.

I know you don't trust ID, and I don't blame you, but you are expereincing very abnormal behaviors with consistency. That says to me that there is something unique about waht you are doing, or the way your system is configured. What else is running -- utilities, other applications, you name it. How many are startup programs? I've not seen trouble reports with most mainstream antivirus programs, but it wouldn't hurt to try turning of A/V for awhile, and the same for anti-malware and oany other "housekeeping" types of utilities or other startup programs that perform tasks not essential to Windows operation.

No check on Preserve Local Overrides. Drop down is Unformatted Tables.

Just about like running text through NotePad . . . all images were dropped, no text styles, no line spacing (block paragraphing, not my choice), 56 tables stripped to bare bones, no Excel tables, odd little text blocks sitting on top of other text . . . but all the pages came through.

At this point, I simply do not have time to track any problems/solutions, test any new fixes, do anything but try to work on the project that were due two weeks ago. I can't afford to screw my customers more than I have.

This Word file had been sent to me in a previous state a few days before the InDesign problems started in early May. I flowed that file into InDesign, examined it, and quoted on the formatting job. It flowed in perfectly. (I never quote on a job without seeing it first--I'm not as stupid as I've been sounding in all this.)

A few days later the InDesign problems started, effecting a different book project--and a few days after that, effecting two more book projects--all unrelated.

Perhaps a week later, the Word file I had quoted on was revised and sent to me to use. It is that file, a revised, second, Word file that has previously flowed into InDesign perfectly, that failed to flow in a few days ago. (To avoid problems, I rarely, if ever, accept Word files received as email attachments; I have them uploaded to my account on YouSendIt.)

One book, 16 chapters, 17 separate files (frontmatter, chapter 1, chapter 2 . . . ). Each chapter has 2 master files: A is the first master for Chapter 1/Docoument 1. Each separate file, then has it's own master based on A.

How's this working for me? File 10, Chapter 9, page 216 . . . it is beginning to corrupt just like before, starting about ten minutes ago.

The text was brought in as pure text, no formatting. Copy and paste for an OCR program.

So . . . this is the project that started my complaint here, the 3rd of 4 books. It is corrupting.

I can't say I'm astonished that the problem is reappearing since you haven't really taken any steps to try to track down what the cause might be. You've isolated the symptoms (or the folks at Adobe have), but nobody so far seems to have any clue what is causing these symptoms to appear.

Albert Einstein had a few things to say that I think may be approriate to your situation:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result (in fairness, you did alter the master page scheme).

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

and

It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

Which is to say that you really do need to spend the time now to try some diagnostic steps on your system to see if you can track down the source of your problem.

I lost 30 days of work with this problem--and I spent 4-16 hours a day, 7 days a week, spent trying to "track down what the cause might be." Kinda like what you said I didn't do, no?

What steps didn't I take? I tried everything suggested to me on this forum, by customer support, and by the "Design Team."

I spend many hours a day help in the CreateSpace forum. If I treated people there like you guys do here . . . I'd have been persona non grata years ago.

As for staying with a problem . . . you really need to spend the time now to try some diagnostic steps on your system to see if you can track down the source of your problem . . . other than being presumptuous, you have no idea.